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In this week’s TLS

Dazzling and disappointed Bernard Williams, Letters from Andrei Platonov, Espionage and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Poetry and Clive James, and much more

Published: 14 May 2014

F
our collections of essays by the philosopher Bernard Williams have been
published since his death in 2003, the last of them, according to Joel Isaac
this week, providing a “different and advantageous perspective” from which
to examine a “dazzling” life that ended in public “disappointment”. Williams
was a thinker who lived among some of the most thoughtful politicians of the
post-war Left in Britain. A well-established view of him is as a
“gimlet-eyed” sage, gifted at showing the faults in conventional pieties and
“always too clear-sighted” to have had large-scale hopes of his own that
time could betray. Isaac detects in his Essays and Reviews (1959–2002)
a personal trajectory of failed expectations in line with the failures of
his political allies. By 1986 he had judged that the Left “could no longer
hope to find the best way of having its cake and eating it”.

The author of the Soviet satire The Foundation Pit (“scum” for
Stalin) had a more direct and visceral sense of failed hopes. Andrei
Platonov’s letters are reviewed
this week by Eric Naiman, the story of a life “tormented by a horror of
cheating, his nation’s, his wife’s, his own”. Some of the correspondence
with his wife is “so candid that they can embarrass even the most hardened
voyeur”. What was she doing on New Year’s Eve, he asks in 1927 from his
exile as head of a provincial land reclamation bureau. “Don’t spare me any
of the disgusting details.”

The savage archives of those years were the raw material for the pioneering
researcher Sheila Fitzpatrick, who in the 1960s contested the view that
after the Revolution there was no history, “merely political science”. Wendy
Slater considers her reputation as “the next thing to a spy” and her
memoir’s “rather diffident tone”.

Clive James has been looking
back at the poets he has failed to love. He still hopes that by
“submitting myself to Paradise Lost” he may find poetic
riches rather than destructive erudition. He has fewer hopes for Swinburne.
But there is good chance of correcting a previous “failure of judgement”
about Elizabeth Bishop. “Thirty years ago I tried to be clever” about her.
But “she was the clever one”.

Peter Stothard

We hope you enjoyed this free piece; the TLS is available every
Thursday on the TLS
app. In this week’s issue, you can also read about George Eliot
the journalist, Tudor voyages of trade and discovery, a spy in the Soviet
archives, the Nazis’ war on modern art, and much more.